Cascading Dropdowns not working.

recently I got the requirement to add filtering to certain dropdowns based on another dropdowns value.

Since both of the dropdowns are list lookups and the second dropdown's source list has a lookup to the source list of the other one, I thought cascading dropdowns would be the best solution.

I quickly whipped up 3 test lists. ZID-Abteilungen (with information on our orgs divisions), ZID-Teams (with information about our orgs teams and a lookup to the ZID-Abteilungen list to identify the division they're part of) and Cascading Dropdown Test (a list to test the cascading dropdown functionality, as the name implies. It features a lookup to ZID-Abteilungen and ZID-Teams).

ZID-Abteilungen:

ZID-Teams

In the nintex form for the Cascading Dropdown Test I put two list-lookups (from the "list columns" section):

I left the lookup control for "ZID-Abteilungen" as it was and configured the control for "ZID-Teams" as follows:

I published the form and tested it. When I chose a division, the team-lookup was "disabled" (no options to chose from).

I was quite confused. I started looking around for solutions on the nintex community and found a couple of posts, none of which seemed to solve the problem. I then implemented a tip from Marian Hatala to put a calculated value on the form to check whether everything works out. I configured the calculated value as follows: parseLookup(AbteilungLookup,true).

I then tried filtering the control (for the team lookup) by that value, but it still wouldn't work.

Last I tried to set the filtering criteria to "by specific value" and put one "IT-Solutions", I previewed the form and voilà, it worked. So it seems that the filtering should work, but not "by a control's value".

Very interesting. If this is truely the cause, it would be quite the revelation. We (us and another division encountering the same problem) have been looking all over the place while trying to find the cause of this problem.

Since we are in a German-speaking environment, all of our SharePoint is obviously setup in German.

Do you know whether setting up a sub page set to English (language and locale) is enough to test it? Or would we need an entirely new environment?

control is already instantiated, and since originally filtered by empty value it's already disabled and in some incorrect state.

Huh, I thought that might be the case, thanks for confirming.

I reviewed my own scenario and there I filtered lookup by a simple text control. in that setup all what I've written above is very valid.

Can you elaborate?

I affraid you will not manage to get it working with two lookups.

What a shame.

btw, apart from that your script to set lookup control's value is not correct...

Weird, it worked when I tried it out... Could you point out the mistake? I'm not that well versed when it comes to JS ^^

it's one of symptoms of the bug (or two bugs which mutually depends on each other)

Is there a place where all (or most of) the known bugs are documented? I tried searching for it but haven't found anything so far.

Thanks again for all the help so far

Edit:

While testing random things I noticed that even if I set "action when no filter applied" to "show all values" while using "By a control's value" will not result in a working dropdown. All of this while trying to use a choice control for the country selection (instead of a lookup) and using a city list which doesn't have a lookup for country but just a simple text. The City control in the form however is a lookup into the city list.

Ah I see, had I read the sentence again, it probably woudl've made sense the first time 'round. But me being me, it didn't, probably directly tied to me being fed up with this whole matter after trying to figure out some way for what felt like eternity.

They must be plotting their next attempt to take over the world then... Just kidding. Guess it's just the way they handle things.

Edit:

Using a simple text field for country, a lookup for city (onto city list) and filtering by the textfield, for "where field" I tried both a country (lookup) and a country (basic text) inside the source list. Neither of those yielded a functioning result. Am I missing some glaringly obvious mistake of mine?

Because using the setup for the form you just described still doesn't work. Even when using a default value of "England" which should then leave me with the options "London", "Manchester" and "Liverpool", it does this:

I provided the default via the list settings and then also tried it with providing a default value inside the control settings which yielded the same results.

Again, when using the same setup and just changing to filter by specific value and putting "England" as the value, it works:

So it seems no matter what I do, the filtering "by a control's value" is the culprit.

Be aware that (,and hopefully I'm not stating the obvious/something you already know,) the value of Abteilungen in your ZID-Teams list is not the value shown (e.g. IT-Management) in the list view. It actually contains the ID as well in the following format:

<ID>;#<Display Value> for example: 1;#IT-Management

Multiple selection lookupvalues go a bit further in the the 2nd+ ID also gets the ;# prefix. for example:

1;#IT-Management;#2;#IT-Operations

Hopefully this helps, in addition to Marian's and other replies to come.

NB: Cascading dropdowns are often created by using simple lookup lists, which unfortunately contain duplicate information (where's the implementation of the InfoPath @Unique function?????).

I created a list with the departments, a Teams list with Title and listlookup for Abteiling. And finally a form list with Title and list lookup column Abteilung. For this last one I created a simple form and added next to Title and the Abteilung dropdown another list lookup field (not linked to a column) for selecting a Team using the selected Abteilung as a filter. And it seems to be working for me.

This is my setup for the filtered list lookup into Teams:

List column name is the Title column of the ZID-Teams list to show in the dropdown. No need to parse the selected Abteilung. I'm using Nintex Forms 2013 on-premise v2.11.2.2

Next I added a list lookup column Team to the form list and reset its Nintex Form. Applying the same filtering setting (minus indicating the Title column for use as display value in the dropdown) also works as expected. So maybe you could check you Nintex Forms version in order to determine whether or not it needs updating.

I checked the release notes for v2.11.2.2, v2.11.2.20 and v2.11.3.0 but didn't find anything that seems to be directly connected to this specific issue.

Apparently another division within our org (on the same environment) also experiences this issue. Thus I doubt it has anything to do with the actual configuration of my form and more likely something to do with our environment.

I will update the post itself should I encounter any advancements concerning (the solution of) this issue

That would be appreciated Lucas. In case your company has a test/dev environment, and you not already tried this, you could test there as well, and maybe also after updating Nintex Forms to the latest version.... looking forward to any updates.

I believe the issue is with the filtering "by a control's value" specifically. Since filtering by a specified value works just fine and regular lookups work too.

Judging from all the advice I got from Marian Hatala, I think the problem won't be easily solved. Seeing as we might migrate/change to SP 2016 and Nintex 2016 soon (where we have already tested this on a test environment), I think I can safely stamp this issue as "unresolved until further notice" internaly.

In a similar situation, I've added a calculated column to the source list (to each source list actually) that is a calculation of the Title, so the source will have Title and calcTitle. CalcTitle is just set to = [Title] - so you'll appear to be repeating this. However, at the next step, the caclTitle will be text that is available for your cascaded lookup.

Concerning your suggstion about using a calculated field, I fail to see how that would help me out in this situation.

From reading your response I feel like you accidentally left out a part, specifically before (or after, depending on how you'd write it) "However, at the next step..."

If I understand your instructions correctly, you suggest that I have a column of the type calculated field, which just repeats what would be (in my latest example, see the exchange between Marian and me) City and Country respectively?

These two are already plain old text, and the Country Lookup (in the City list) can't be used in a calculated field (as it is a lookup) at least from my experience.

Please correct my assumptions should they be misguided. Any and all input is welcome ^^